A star like the Sun has an internal driving in the form of a magnetic field that can be seen on the surface as sunspots. Now astrophysicists from the Niels Bohr Institute have observed a distant star in the constellation Andromeda with a different positioning of sunspots and this indicates a magnetic field that is driven by completely different internal dynamics. The results are published in the scientific journal, Nature.
Stars are glowing balls of gas that through atomic processes release energy that is emitted as light and heat. In the interior of the star are charged particles that swirl and spin and thereby create a magnetic field that can burst out onto the surface of the star, where it appears as sunspots. Sunspots are cool areas caused by the strong magnetic fields where the flow of heat is slowed. On our star, the Sun, the sunspots are seen in a belt around the equator, but now scientists have observed a large, distant star where sunspots are located near the poles.
"What we can observe on the star is that it has a large sunspot at its north pole. We cannot see the south pole, but we can see sunspots at latitudes near the poles and these sunspots are not there at the same time, they are seen alternately on the northern and southern hemispheres. This asymmetry of sunspots indicates that the star's magnetic field is formed in a different way than the way it happens in the Sun," explains astrophysicist Heidi Korhonen, Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
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